Cutting people up, performing medical experiments on them without their permission: these things absolutely qualify as things that you can very validly suggest are done by someone who has something wrong with him. I understood those to be the sorts of atrocities Shaw was talking about, given the context. Which horrible things were you talking about?
On your own planet, for hundreds of years, a person might whip another to death with a bullwhip, not because they had any disordered internal development, but because that was culturally considered a just and reasonable response to a sufficiently impudent slave.
[He knows less about Earth's history of medical experimentation, but thanks to Flint, he knows plenty about the history of slavery and Empire.]
In the Heptarchate, heretics and barbarian prisoners were tortured to death every day, by normal people who loved their children, because it was a job they believed was right and correct to do, and those people the appropriate and correct victims. I would hazard a guess that in every world, some otherwise ordinary soldiers sometimes bomb civilians, even children. Because soldiers are taught to obey and win, and normal human nature is to learn values from those you trust.
I think most of those people have some complex emotional reactions to living in those roles, and become more desensitized to violence over time, but the atrocities come first, not the disorder, far more often than the reverse.
Even among the most empathetic people I know, I don't believe I've ever met anyone who practices their empathy universally. The normal function of human empathy is to apply it to those closest to you first. To judge, and choose.
No one writes psychology books about why soldiers or inquisitors kill, because that is not a problem anyone with power wants to solve. It's only a problem if it's transgressive. And people transgress because they lack impulse control, or because they have been harmed badly enough to lose faith in the social order.
What sort of emotional disorder qualifies a person as a psychopath, in your view?
We were talking about Hilbert’s issues versus Shaw’s disorder in terms of who was more trustworthy to do no harm. The generalizations I was making were necessarily small scale. On the other hand, the psychology of executioners and people who choose soldiering as a career - as opposed to regular people drafted or otherwise coerced or cajoled into the role - is actually pretty interesting because those careers tend to attract people to them who want to commit those otherwise transgressive acts, as a matter of fact. They’re not necessarily psychopaths. Some are justice killers or mission oriented killers who want to punish the people they deem sinners or unworthy in some way - that gives them satisfaction and fulfillment - and some are just garden variety sadists. Psychopathy is an extremely complex mental disorder, not… an emotional state. Psychopathy is the disorder, but not everyone who derives pleasure from hurting people is one.
What I'm saying, Malcolm, is that atrocities are not always transgressive. Violence is more often not transgressive than the reverse. It's just that those were the ones given you to study.
Hilbert didn't hurt people because he had any disconnect from reality or any deformation of the completely ordinary human emotional process of closing off empathy from people who would be painful or dangerous or inconvenient to empathize with. He simply thought his scientific goals were worth other people's sacrifice. He's not even a sadist, aside from being ordinarily vindictive. He just has bad values.
If that falls under 'psychopath', then I don't know how the word usefully discriminates anything at all. And maybe it's just that the barge is putting English in my head wrong, but it tastes to me like a word with very strong connotations. If you announce to the barge that every person who's committed some shocking act of violence is a psychopath, you are going to have many inmates and not a few wardens feel as though the supposed mental health professional on board is calling them a broken monster. So I think you really ought to reconsider that.
Not everyone who commits shocking acts of violence is a psychopath; their individual pathologies would have to be evaluated on a case by case basis. But what am I talking about? Like with… by my count everything, you clearly know more about the subject than I do. In which case I apologize for my gross mischaracterization of the work of an upstanding citizen and any offence I’ve caused many inmates and not a few wardens. I don’t even know how I got into two arguments about this: I only wanted to say that I think she’s at least as suitable as her predecessor, if not moreso. I still believe that.
You got into two arguments about it because you're careless, Malcolm. You don't think about the implications of your words, so you say shit in public like "people with normal emotions don't commit atrocities." Whatever you wanted to say, that's what you actually said.
Implying very directly that people who have committed atrocities don't have normal emotions, which is a shitty thing for person in a position of trust to announce in a place where a lot of people are trying to reckon with messy pasts, whether you believe it or not.
I do believe that; do you think people can’t reckon with their messes with disordered emotions? I’m - again - not calling everyone psychopaths, but there are a lot of disorders of emotion that predispose anything from impulse control problems to muted emotions to exaggerated emotional responses. And all of them make someone more likely to commit atrocities than normal emotion and with varying degrees of remorse. Do… do you think anyone who ends up here thinks they’re a paragon of completely normal psychological markers?
I called one mad scientist a psychopath. You brought up atrocities and what sort of psychological markers they require. Maybe that was an overreaction.
Diagnosing various emotional and mental disorders takes years of study. Happy to explain the exacting criteria; when do you want to start? You’re the one that took what I said about one person and extrapolated it to everyone here and also everyone who’s ever done everything bad. You know what? Well-adjusted, mentally well people with no emotional disorders? They only kill if there’s no other option and sometimes can’t then. “Atrocities” is a whole other level of killing and… yeah. I stand by that there has to be something wrong with you that you need help with if you’re capable of committing them. Sometimes it’s something that can’t be changed - just a bad person - and sometimes it’s the world’s most unfortunate cry for help - someone who needs therapy or the Barge or an outlet or something else - and aren’t a bad person, they’re just a person in distress. But that’s not psychologically “normal”. Maybe you mean “normal” as in “common”, but that isn’t how you used it. You used it as the opposite of “disordered”.
[For a moment he still looks frustrated, raw honest emotion. For a moment his face scrunches up in bitterness, eyes gone cold and hard, and then it all goes away, under a blank quiet like deep new snow.
If he doesn't trust Malcolm enough to keep arguing in good faith, then he has no right to keep arguing at all. If he's going to stop - just because Malcolm is wrong and dangerous is no excuse to hurt him on purpose, not when it will only feed Malcolm's defensiveness without driving him off, when it won't make anything better.]
I don't want you to give up. I want you to explain where my reasoning is wrong - if it is - or... what you mean by normal, if I'm wrong about how you're using it. I gave you definitions of how I mean what I said and the context of how I meant it and who I applied it to. You could explain to me why, factually, it's wrong. Or, maybe more helpfully, why what I said - a clinical analysis, not a judgement - upsets you so much. I was just trying to tell Shaw that I think she's more suited to the job, psychologically, than her predecessor and you came at me on the attack. Why?
You were intending to speak about Shaw and Hilbert, but what you said was an extremely reductive blanket statement about the nature of people, emotions, and evil, which you have confirmed multiple times you do actually believe. And I think if you go around saying that belief in public, the odds are high that you will hurt people. That's why I tried to argue with you.
Now that we have, I don't think we misunderstand each other. I think we have fundamentally different beliefs about the facts of the matter, and I don't think you're capable of hearing any of my explanations. That's why I want to stop.
But okay. I'll try one more time.
I did use normal as the opposite of disordered. What I did not do is use normal as a synonym for...positive, or optimal, or happy or even healthy. But it is normal, it is the correct functioning of the system, to be affected by circumstances. It's not paranoia if you can hear the hounds behind you. If you've been betrayed, it's normal not to trust. If you've been tortured, it's normal to dissociate. If you exist in the world, it's normal to develop some degree of self-protective callousness. If you are a child, it's normal to trust and absorb the values of the people who keep you safe. It's normal to learn from other people, because we're social creatures. Any and all of those things can lead to atrocities.
When you say people who've been through any of that "don't have normal emotions", or are sometimes just bad people or have something wrong with them, you're taking system of nested feedback loops and treating it like simple cause and effect, in what is mostly the wrong direction. Most people don't do atrocities because they have a disorder. People become disordered because their world makes it normal to commit atrocities.
It's possible to be disordered if, if the input-output process is throwing out coping mechanisms that are completely mismatched to the input. Someone who can't feel remorse, I'd call that disordered. That's abnormal. But it's very, very normal for remorse to be applied very sparingly, if the mind has learned that that's the best strategy to avoid pain. Hilbert very explicitly graduated because he did experience remorse after Blanky's death. He wasn't incapable. Only selective. And that's more than enough to enable him to do all the fucking atrocities he did. That's more than enough for millions of people, all the time.
Nobody is born broken. Someone breaks us. But being broken isn't... it's not the person's fault but it is a state of ill mental health. That's all I'm saying.
And...okay, I tried to make a broken bone metaphor but I can't make it work. Ill heath, then. Having a fever because your body is responding to infection is very different from having a thyroid condition that makes your body regulate its temperature incorrectly. Treating the former like the latter, calling it all disordered isn't helpful.
[Responding normally to infection. Symptoms and causes. Causes and effects.
Jedao sighs and shakes his head.]
No. You were only speaking to wardens, and I'm sure Hilbert in particular doesn't care. Drawing more attention to it will do more harm than good.
What I want is for you to be more careful about making sweeping generalizations and assumptions - especially about people you don't like, because it makes you extra careless - when you're speaking on an open channel. I don't know if that's...if there's a point to asking that.
[It seems baffling that Malcolm might have gone this long without anyone telling him so before now. Jedao can't know how much he's tried. Neither possibility is wildly encouraging, really.]
You might also be unwilling. You might have told me it's an unfair demand.
That's three possibilities and if you don't know which describes me, you'll also never find out if you don't ask. But maybe you don't care to know. Maybe this is a bridge too far and you don't think it's worth it anymore and that's why there's no point. You signed up to help inmates, not socially inept wardens who can't shut up.
You informed me what you want and “I don’t know if there’s a point” isn’t a question, either. And I wanted to know why you wondered that because I thought we were friends. Last time you told me I did a problem, I fixed it and didn’t do it again. That wasn’t an answer?
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And your books say that something is, invariably, a reduced or absent capacity for emotions and empathy. Do I have that right?
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On your own planet, for hundreds of years, a person might whip another to death with a bullwhip, not because they had any disordered internal development, but because that was culturally considered a just and reasonable response to a sufficiently impudent slave.
[He knows less about Earth's history of medical experimentation, but thanks to Flint, he knows plenty about the history of slavery and Empire.]
In the Heptarchate, heretics and barbarian prisoners were tortured to death every day, by normal people who loved their children, because it was a job they believed was right and correct to do, and those people the appropriate and correct victims. I would hazard a guess that in every world, some otherwise ordinary soldiers sometimes bomb civilians, even children. Because soldiers are taught to obey and win, and normal human nature is to learn values from those you trust.
I think most of those people have some complex emotional reactions to living in those roles, and become more desensitized to violence over time, but the atrocities come first, not the disorder, far more often than the reverse.
Even among the most empathetic people I know, I don't believe I've ever met anyone who practices their empathy universally. The normal function of human empathy is to apply it to those closest to you first. To judge, and choose.
No one writes psychology books about why soldiers or inquisitors kill, because that is not a problem anyone with power wants to solve. It's only a problem if it's transgressive. And people transgress because they lack impulse control, or because they have been harmed badly enough to lose faith in the social order.
What sort of emotional disorder qualifies a person as a psychopath, in your view?
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Hilbert didn't hurt people because he had any disconnect from reality or any deformation of the completely ordinary human emotional process of closing off empathy from people who would be painful or dangerous or inconvenient to empathize with. He simply thought his scientific goals were worth other people's sacrifice. He's not even a sadist, aside from being ordinarily vindictive. He just has bad values.
If that falls under 'psychopath', then I don't know how the word usefully discriminates anything at all. And maybe it's just that the barge is putting English in my head wrong, but it tastes to me like a word with very strong connotations. If you announce to the barge that every person who's committed some shocking act of violence is a psychopath, you are going to have many inmates and not a few wardens feel as though the supposed mental health professional on board is calling them a broken monster. So I think you really ought to reconsider that.
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Implying very directly that people who have committed atrocities don't have normal emotions, which is a shitty thing for person in a position of trust to announce in a place where a lot of people are trying to reckon with messy pasts, whether you believe it or not.
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I don't know if you have the phrase in English....it's not paranoia if you can hear the hounds behind you?
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Forget it. Bad people have wrong disordered emotions and you can tell because they do bad things. Got it.
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If he doesn't trust Malcolm enough to keep arguing in good faith, then he has no right to keep arguing at all. If he's going to stop - just because Malcolm is wrong and dangerous is no excuse to hurt him on purpose, not when it will only feed Malcolm's defensiveness without driving him off, when it won't make anything better.]
Okay. You win. I'm giving up now.
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You were intending to speak about Shaw and Hilbert, but what you said was an extremely reductive blanket statement about the nature of people, emotions, and evil, which you have confirmed multiple times you do actually believe. And I think if you go around saying that belief in public, the odds are high that you will hurt people. That's why I tried to argue with you.
Now that we have, I don't think we misunderstand each other. I think we have fundamentally different beliefs about the facts of the matter, and I don't think you're capable of hearing any of my explanations. That's why I want to stop.
But okay. I'll try one more time.
I did use normal as the opposite of disordered. What I did not do is use normal as a synonym for...positive, or optimal, or happy or even healthy. But it is normal, it is the correct functioning of the system, to be affected by circumstances. It's not paranoia if you can hear the hounds behind you. If you've been betrayed, it's normal not to trust. If you've been tortured, it's normal to dissociate. If you exist in the world, it's normal to develop some degree of self-protective callousness. If you are a child, it's normal to trust and absorb the values of the people who keep you safe. It's normal to learn from other people, because we're social creatures. Any and all of those things can lead to atrocities.
When you say people who've been through any of that "don't have normal emotions", or are sometimes just bad people or have something wrong with them, you're taking system of nested feedback loops and treating it like simple cause and effect, in what is mostly the wrong direction. Most people don't do atrocities because they have a disorder. People become disordered because their world makes it normal to commit atrocities.
It's possible to be disordered if, if the input-output process is throwing out coping mechanisms that are completely mismatched to the input. Someone who can't feel remorse, I'd call that disordered. That's abnormal. But it's very, very normal for remorse to be applied very sparingly, if the mind has learned that that's the best strategy to avoid pain. Hilbert very explicitly graduated because he did experience remorse after Blanky's death. He wasn't incapable. Only selective. And that's more than enough to enable him to do all the fucking atrocities he did. That's more than enough for millions of people, all the time.
And some of them are here.
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Do you think I should issue a public apology?
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[And you should know better, he doesn't say.]
And...okay, I tried to make a broken bone metaphor but I can't make it work. Ill heath, then. Having a fever because your body is responding to infection is very different from having a thyroid condition that makes your body regulate its temperature incorrectly. Treating the former like the latter, calling it all disordered isn't helpful.
[Responding normally to infection. Symptoms and causes. Causes and effects.
Jedao sighs and shakes his head.]
No. You were only speaking to wardens, and I'm sure Hilbert in particular doesn't care. Drawing more attention to it will do more harm than good.
What I want is for you to be more careful about making sweeping generalizations and assumptions - especially about people you don't like, because it makes you extra careless - when you're speaking on an open channel. I don't know if that's...if there's a point to asking that.
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[It seems baffling that Malcolm might have gone this long without anyone telling him so before now. Jedao can't know how much he's tried. Neither possibility is wildly encouraging, really.]
You might also be unwilling. You might have told me it's an unfair demand.
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There is some overlap between the two, but only if I'm actually effective.
I did ask, you'll notice.
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